I use a combination of Digital Orchestrator Pro from Voyetra (www.voyetra.com) and Cool Edit Pro. This give me a nice interface to record with (DOP) and great effects processing using Cool Edit. You can hear a couple of the tracks we recorded in my last band using DOP at

http://druidry.org/obod/text/eisteddfod/audio.html

under Damh the bard, which purely used DOP which we banged down to DAT and had pressed. As for hardware I'm using an 800MHz processor, Win 98 SE and a fast hard drive. I have a Soundblaster Live Platinum card which came with the unit (is it called the Live Wire?) which fits in a 5 1/2" bay in the front of the PC and means you can plug in 1/4" jack plugs and also has DIN sockets and allows you to adjust the headphone volume and line input gain from the front of the PC instead of having to grub around behind the PC.